


Flightless Son

by a_xmasmurder



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Depression, Dreams, Finding yourself again, Gen, Minor mention of suicide attempt, Wingfic, mention of alcohol abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 05:39:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_xmasmurder/pseuds/a_xmasmurder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Bond used to have dreams. In those dreams, he could fly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flightless Son

**Author's Note:**

> Just an idea, you know? And I went with it, as you do.

James Bond used to have dreams. Actual dreams. He’d had such a vivid imagination, even as a child, cultivated by a varied lifestyle and long periods of being on his own. Every single one was the same in one respect: in the dreams, he had wings.

In his dreams, he could fly.

Sometimes, he soared above the clouds, the stark white of his feathers glinting in the morning sun. He dove low above the water like an albatross, lazy wingbeats carrying him with ease; a traveler of the world. Other times, he was in a forest, the mottled browns and greys blending in with the trees. Here, he was a predator, snatching up mice and rabbits with deadly accuracy, but he never killed what he couldn’t eat. And yet other times, he felt like he was in a cage, but the door would open and he was free to roam the city, a city he loved with all his heart. Bright colours that would normally give him away hid him now, flittering between pedestrians and cars.

He loved these dreams, because he was more alive than he ever could be while he was awake. He cherished going to bed, when he could, because then he’d be away from the horrors, away from the fear, the anger, the pain...he could fly, and the world was right again. He could escape.

They survived long into his new life as an agent of MI6, and enabled him to escape once more when the job became too much for him to handle. That happened sometimes. When it did, he’d set aside the report he was working on or the gun he was testing, go home, and go to bed. Sometimes, all it took was turning on the telly to something dense and idiotic, sometimes it took something a bit stronger. More often than not, it was alcohol. But when he’d close his eyes, he wasn’t Bond, James Bond. He was simply James, and he’d fly off across the Atlantic Ocean, far away from MI6, and visit islands in the Pacific Ocean.

His dreams finally died when he fell off the train, when he fell to the waters below the bridge.

In real life, he couldn’t fly worth a damn.

 

When he returned from the dead, he had two new scars and post traumatic stress disorder. He no longer had a home; they’d buried that along with his name. He’d buried so much more, though, just to be able to come back without death and destruction in his heart. Buried and burned. He fought to come back, and he would be damned before they turn him away now.

They didn’t, but with the new assignment came a new face and a new danger. He’d nodded at the young Quartermaster, an ache in his heart for Geoffrey Boothroyd, and accepted his mission. He’d found Silva, lost Severine, then lost Silva in a spectacular way. Then he regained him in a even more spectacular way, one that cost him the closest thing to a mother he’d ever had.

No one could fly in real life. But it would be nice to try.

 

In the months afterward, he tried reclaiming those dreams, the only places he felt free, but they would not come. The only things that came for him were the nightmares, the bitter taste of blood, the weight of a dead body in his hands, the tang of smoke in his lungs. If he had wings in these dreams, they would be tattered and torn, smudged with dirt and neglected. But he never did. The wings weren’t there. And though he knew they weren’t real, he still felt their absence, like a hole in the world.

But one morning, early, before the sun rose above the cityscape of London, he awoke from one of those horrid nightmares to an angel sitting on the foot of his bed. The only thing that stopped him from pulling the gun he had in a bedside holster was that the angel was not real. He couldn’t be real.

Real people didn’t have wings.

The angel also looked like the new Q, all angles and hipster and fluffy hair and not quite enough experience to be dead-eyed like everyone else. James hoped for a moment that he never would, that he’d come to his senses and quit while he was ahead. But this couldn’t be Q, because Q wouldn’t have grey iridescent wings, much like a pigeon’s.

The first words out of Bond were, “I would have pegged you for crow’s wings.” The next words were, “I must still be dreaming.”

Angel-Q smiled beatifically at him, and nodded. “Normally, I would. But grey seems to be in today.” He cocked his head. “And you are most likely dreaming, yes.”

Bond woke up again, and Angel-Q wasn’t sitting on his bed anymore. He sighed, and readjusted the sweaty sheets around his body once more.

 

It was months before he had another dream, months of death and destruction and fiery nightmares. This time, the angel wasn’t there, but he was on a beach in the Mediterranean, a warm wind rustling his...oh.

He had wings again.

Beside himself with delight, he stretched them out - and nearly recoiled with horror as the dark feathers started falling out, singly and in clumps. His hands flew up to catch them before they could float away in the breeze, panic gripping his heart. Flecks of blood and soot marred the fibres of the feathers he was able to rescue, and he cried for them. Then he woke up.

 _Men like me don’t deserve wings_ , he thought.

 

For two weeks, he refused to go to bed without drinking himself into a stupor, just so he could avoid this new horror. People noticed. How could they not? He was snarlier than usual, he didn’t even try to snark, and his natural flirtation turned to short remarks and head nods. Eve tried to take him out to a park and he get ever more angry at the doves and pigeons flying around him. Flying. All he wanted to do was fly, and he couldn’t because his wings were ruined by war and no one would understand. He couldn’t tell anyone about the dreams, especially the dreams he had before. The good ones. The ones where he’d go to the Galapagos Islands and play with the giant tortoises there. The ones where he’d fly high above Scotland’s moors and hunt the small creatures that resided there. The ones where he’d perch high up on the Thames Barrier and watch the people walk through his city.

He missed those dreams, and he would never have them again.

Eve stopped taking him to the park.

People stopped trying to interact with him.

He fell further into what he knew was probably depression, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. He didn’t want to care. He just drank more.

He closed his eyes once, and Angel-Q was there. He punched the man and snarled at him. “How come you have wings and I can’t?”

Angel-Q smiled softly through a busted lip. “You have to find your way back. Don’t fall further. Swim back up.”

“I…” He opened his eyes, and the Quartermaster was there, a hand raised to touch him, and Bond turned away and removed himself from MI6 entirely. He packed his bags with what meager belongings he had and left his phone on the kitchen counter along with a note.

**_I’m going to find myself._ **

 

Skyfall was long gone. He had nowhere to go. But he didn’t go to Scotland. He bought plane tickets and went to New York City. Paris. Sardinia. Hong Kong, where he’d found a woman and had a whirlwind 48 hour romance with her, until her father showed up and killed her; James killed him right back. Sydney. Tokyo. Bagram Air Base, where he sat and joked with the soldiers there, and engaged in target practise for a week. Los Angeles. Cleveland. A tiny town in Wisconsin he couldn’t even remember the name of, but it had a factory where they made cheese curds and he savored them. Salt Lake City. He went back to the small town in Wisconsin and got a motel room. It was quiet there. No explosions. No death. No expectations. He wandered around, garnering stares at his suits. He changed to jeans and a tee, and then he garnered stares at his accent. But no one was shooting at him. No one was trying to kill him. He wasn’t safe, but for a moment, he was surrounded by calm, and his soul was calm.

And when he went to sleep, there were no nightmares. But there were no wings, either.

After a week, he moved on. Toronto, Billings. Virginia Beach, where he ran into an old enemy and a car was blown up. Nagasaki. Pyongyang, which was probably the worst idea he’d made so far, and he made it out with a broken rib and a new scar on his side. Back to Toronto to go to a bookshop and pick up a book he knew Q would like.

And then news: There’d been an attack on a station in South Africa, where - somehow - Q and Eve had both been on assignment, and there were deaths. He didn’t know who, or why, but if it was one of them…

He got on the first plane he could, and flew as fast as he could to Johannesburg, where he finds Q in a right state, and Eve holding a rather large sniper rifle. He smirks in joy and stays far away from the woman. He also finds that Q has a really hard punch thanks to his bony hands and wicked upper body strength that came from lifting projects and computers and clandestine pull-ups in the rec room.

He supposes he deserves it, disappearing like that.

“I had to find my wings, Q.” He’s not sure why he said it, but there it was. The look Q gave him opened a well of hope in his tattered soul, because the look was soft and understanding. Then the Quartermaster went back to ripping into the techs that let the attackers through the security net, and Bond left him to it. He wandered to the bedroom and collapsed into sleep.

Angel-Q was there. “Better, James?”

Bond twisted around and didn’t see wings. “No.”

“Wait. They will return, but you must believe.”

He frowned. “I have nothing left to believe in.”

“Then believe in this.” Angel-Q laid a pristine grey feather in his palm and closed his fingers around it.

He woke up, and there was a grey feather on his pillow.

Time passed, flowing like water in a river. There are missions. Assignments. Assassination attempts. Another explosion. And no dreams of soaring in the clouds around a mountain, or swooping down to sink talons into a dormouse, or darting amongst cars. Bond wasn’t drinking as much anymore, and the feather never left his side.

He tried to believe in wings, and flying.

 

One day, he’s sitting at his desk, staring at a blank screen, and Q comes up to him with a cup of coffee.

“I tried killing myself when I was thirteen.” He sat down on the chair next to Bond.

Bond stared at him. “How?” He fingered the feather, worn and weathered now, in his hip pocket.

Q shrugged. “Pills. Swallowed as many of whatever I could get my hands on. My foster parents had a lot of them around the house.” He huffed out a sigh and sipped his tea. “I was bullied, ridiculous now that I think about it. Killing myself over something as silly as that. But at that time, it was so horrid I couldn’t deal with it.”

Bond was quiet, because that was what one did when someone was telling something very personal.

“After I got out of the psyche ward and back into the foster care system, I started dreaming of flying.” He shrugged. “I suppose you could say that almost dying gave me my wings.”

Bond winced. “I. I lost mine on that tress. Or in the water, I’m not sure.”

“So you lost yours when you ‘died’, yeah?” Q shrugged and stood. “Then stop dying.”

As he walked away, Bond huffed. If only it was that easy.

But in the end, it was, indeed, rather easy to stop dying. It just took some effort on Q’s part.

People began to notice the Quartermaster spending more time near Bond. He’d make James coffee, or bring him a sandwich when he was doing paperwork. He’d go to the rec room with James and spar with him; even if it meant bruises and scrapes and, on one memorable occasion, a broken pair of glasses. And slowly, people began to notice something else: James was becoming happier. Perhaps not as happy as someone who didn’t have a good chunk of their paycheck deemed hazard pay, but as happy as he could be. He smiled, joked, and flirted. He worked on the Aston Martin on his downtime, usually enlisting Eve’s help. He began engaging people in conversation, which tended to scare some because most conversations devolved into relentless flirting or complaints about not having bobbles that exploded anymore. He had dinner with Q and Eve most nights, when he wasn’t on assignment. And when his good friend Alec Trevelyan came back from wherever the bloody hell he’d gone off to, he got even happier.

 

One night, over drinks, he decided to tell his new friends and his old one about his dreams. The ones he used to have. The dreams of flight, of exploration. He found something out, something he didn’t think could happen. Q, he knew about. But Eve and Alec told him with some awe that they, too, have those dreams. Alec said his had stopped a while ago, while he'd been on assignment, and he missed them. Eve’s began shortly after she’d shot Bond off the train, and James had to wonder if she’d stolen his wings. They laughed and smiled together, over those drinks, and told each other the best dreams they’d had, and the worst dreams. James told them about losing his feathers in clumps; Q spoke of interrogations where his captors broke every bone in his wings, Alec’s wings had frozen solid, and Eve simply lost them completely.

At the end of the night, they all went home together, and James was glad he wasn’t alone.

And later, nestled in Q’s arms with Eve’s head resting on his hip and Alec sitting on the edge of the bed muttering quietly at his mobile, Bond drifted off to sleep...and he had wings again.

He stretched them carefully, fully expecting heartbreak and dismay as feathers came away, tattered and torn. But they stayed put. He stroked the brown and tan and milk feathers, so soft beneath his roughened skin. He felt a tear track on his cheek, and he wiped it away. Finally. His wings have returned to him. He turned and surveyed the dreamscape, and found Q, wings dark and spread wide. He was smiling, and Bond smiled back. Eve walked to his side, her mottled grey and white feathers ruffling in the slight breeze. And in the distance, Bond could see Alec already taking off, stark black wings against the bright blue sky. Bond grinned, a weight in his heart lifted after so long, his soul feeling lighter than it had in such a long time.

One wing beat, two...and he was up, in the air, with his friends. The air rushing past his ears was a noise sorely missed, and he laughed in glee. Now, he could show them his heart, his mind, and his soul. He could finally share with them his loves.

Freedom, the ocean, and London.

 


End file.
